The Other Gwyn Girl, page 1
THE OTHER GWYN GIRL
NICOLA CORNICK
For Andrew, with love always.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Letters From the Past
About Boldwood Books
PROLOGUE
ROSE – OXFORD, FEBRUARY 1650
A bitter wind blew down Magpie Lane, sending the snowflakes swirling. A single lantern, high on the wall of Christ Church College, cast a dancing shadow as we passed beneath it and slipped through the doorway into Merton College gardens.
Mother held me tight by the hand; in her other arm, she cradled the baby, who had wailed for the whole journey from our lodgings in Botley, her voice a thin, high thread, tiny but determined.
‘Be quick, Rose,’ Mother said, when I stumbled, tiredness and cold pulling me down. ‘Nell will catch a chill if you dawdle along like this.’ She sounded both cross and distracted. She always did.
I was five years old and could remember a time before, when it had been summer and we had lived in the country. Father had been there and the sun had shone every day. Now it was perpetual winter, Father had gone, and Nell had arrived.
The gardens were shrouded in darkness and the path was lost beneath the snow, but a lamp burned in a downstairs window. Mother released my hand and hurried towards it, a moth to the flame. I ran to keep up.
I saw her rap on the pane three times, sharply. A door opened and we were bundled inside.
‘Why must Nell have her horoscope cast tonight?’ I had asked Mother earlier, when she had told me we were to go out into the city that night. I had been warm, or at least as warm as I could be in our draughty garret rooms, and was drowsily contemplating my hot milk and my cot.
‘Because the timing of such celestial matters is critical,’ Mother had said sharply.
‘Why?’ I had pressed again.
‘Because Mr Ashmole says so.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do you always ask so many questions, Rose?’
I think Mother had been tempted to leave me behind that night but feared that Mrs Culpeper, who owned the lodging house, might kidnap me and sell me in payment for our rent arrears.
Oxford was a dangerous place in the winter of early 1650; the Puritans had finally crushed the spirit that had made the city such a stronghold of Royalist support under the late King Charles I. Informers, spies and enforcers abounded. Masterless men roamed the streets. Old soldiers and their families were left to starve and the shadow of death stalked the narrow alleyways. People hid behind their shuttered windows on nights like this.
Except, evidently, there were those at the university who still lived in grand style. We were in a big, shadowy room, a library lit by candlelight, lined with bookcases and decorated with huge white heads carved from stone. It was a rich man’s room, smelling of pipe smoke and the lingering scents of a roast dinner.
I stared about me, dripping melting snow onto the soft carpet beneath my feet, and then I saw the open fire and hurried towards it to thaw my frozen fingers. I climbed up into the huge armchair directly beside it and settled in, luxuriating in the heat.
‘Rose!’ Mother exclaimed, but the man who had come forward to greet her only laughed.
‘The little maid knows what she wants and takes it,’ he said. ‘It is not a bad philosophy for life.’
‘Rose rushes headlong towards everything,’ Mother said. Her bitterness was clear. ‘She does not think. She is just like her father.’
I loved my father dearly and could see nothing wrong in being in his image, but evidently my mother did not agree.
The stranger, however, knelt beside my chair to see me more clearly, affording me the chance to assess him too – he was a big man with a florid face and wide forehead, his eyes narrow and bright with intelligence, a reddish hue to his long curly hair and with fine lace at his neck and wrists. A gentleman of substance, then, the sort of man Father had once been, and a scholar too, which Father most certainly had never been.
‘Well met, Mistress Rose Gwyn,’ he said. ‘I am Elias Ashmole.’
The name meant nothing to me, other than that this was the man whom Mother had said we must consult to draw up baby Nell’s horoscope, but when he turned to a hovering maidservant and sent her away to fetch warm chocolate for me, I decided I would love him forever.
Meanwhile, Mother had taken the seat offered beside Mr Ashmole’s desk, which was littered with papers of all kinds and books open at what appeared to be random pages. Nell, whose wailing had dropped to a low grizzle and then died away altogether, was now being admired. I could imagine her gazing at Mr Ashmole with her big blue eyes, wrapping her tiny fingers around his.
As I sipped my warm chocolate from the beaker the maid presented, I listened to his words: ‘An elfin child, so sweetly pretty… You say you saw a star shooting across the sky on the night she was born? Some see that as a harbinger of doom, but I consider it a very auspicious sign. I will draw up her chart for you now…’
The combined effect of the soft scratching of Mr Ashmole’s quill as he sketched the chart, the warmth of the fire and the comfort of the hot chocolate made me very sleepy. As I drifted in and out of dreams, I heard snippets of the conversation:
‘Her sun is in Aquarius… She will be a lively and creative personality…’
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
‘The moon… in the house of Cancer, the Crab…’ Mr Ashmole’s voice had a slight uncertainty to it, but then the confidence returned: ‘A very loyal and passionate person…’
‘Capricorn rising…’ He let out a chuckle. ‘A determined individual, then. Nothing will stand in her way.’
‘I knew it!’ Mother sounded excited. ‘I knew she was destined for great things when I saw the star in the sky overhead on the night of her birth.’
‘Like the baby Jesus,’ I said.
Both of them looked at me.
‘Well, perhaps not quite,’ Mr Ashmole said. He peered at me over the top of his spectacles. ‘Do you wish me to do your chart as well, little maid? When were you born?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I am nearly five years old.’
Mr Ashmole looked enquiringly at Mother.
‘It was in the dark days of the summer of ’45,’ she said, ‘when the King’s fortunes had turned.’ Then, lowering her voice, ‘We do not speak of it.’
‘I see,’ Mr Ashmole said.
There would be no horoscope for me, then.
Scratch, scratch, scratch. I dozed.
‘Scorpio in mid-heaven,’ Mr Ashmole murmured. ‘Oh, there will be challenges along her path, no question about it, but she will triumph over them.’
‘I want her to be happy,’ Mother said, suddenly vehement. ‘I want her to be safe.’
‘She will be more than that,’ Mr Ashmole promised. ‘She will be celebrated. And she will know a great love.’
‘Oh, love!’ Mother sniffed. ‘I would rather hear that she will marry a rich man for his fortune.’
‘I do not see a marriage…’ Mr Ashmole cleared his throat. ‘One must remember, madam, that a horoscope is not proscriptive, only a guide to the path the child might take…’
I slid off my chair and went to stand beside the desk, curious to see the chart he was creating. I was too short to see over the edge, so Mr Ashmole drew up a stool for me to sit on. I was disappointed that the horoscope, which had sounded so intriguing, was completely incomprehensible, no more than a wheel of squiggles, letters and odd symbols.
‘Is it magic?’ I ventured, tracing a finger over one of the drawings, which looked like a wiggling worm.
‘No, little maid,’ Mr Ashmole said firmly. ‘It is science, not magic. It takes a skilled scholar to interpret a chart.’
I could not see that this would be of much use to baby Nell, who would not be able to read it, but I was glad it was not magic. Our father had shown me some magic tricks last summer when we were at Becote Manor, making ribbons and buttons disappear, and daisies spring from my ears until I was screaming with laughter.
‘Always believe in magic, pet,’ he had told me, but the only magic that had happened since then was that both Father and the manor had disappeared, apparently for good.
Mr Ashmole finished the horoscope with a flourish.
‘I will have a clerk copy it for you tomorrow and deliver it to your lodgings,’ he promised. ‘The original will stay in my collection, of course, for the scholars of the future to study.’
This all sounded rather grand to me. Would scholars of the future be interested in my baby sister? But Mother seemed impressed and she reached into the hem of her skirt and took out a small bag of money. I heard the clink of coins as she held it out to Mr Ashmole.
‘With my thanks, sir,’ she said.
I wanted to cry out to her not to give the last of our money away, for I had had nothing but bone broth and gruel to eat for the past week, but Mr Ashmole, fortunately, refused.
‘Dear madam…’ He pushed the hand holding the money away gently. ‘I would not dream of it. Keep your coins to feed your girls and in recognition of our shared loyalties.’ He dropped his voice. ‘I was very sorry to hear about Captain Gwyn. Out of respect for his father, the late Canon, I wish I could help you, but alas…’
He did not explain why the help would not be forthcoming and he was already crossing the library to usher us back out of the door and into the cold. The icy draught that wrapped around my legs was a shock that almost made me cry out. I could not imagine attempting to walk back to the garret in Botley through these snowdrifts.
Mr Ashmole, however, seemed keen to be rid of us now that the horoscope was cast.
‘Remember, Madam Gwyn,’ he called, almost gaily, ‘there is a brilliant future ahead of your younger daughter. Have faith!’
Faith would not feed us, nor would it warm us, I thought, as the cold bit into my toes.
I remembered his words again when I was lying in my cot at our lodgings, Mother snoring beside me and baby Nell snuffling in her sleep like a little piglet. Fortunately, in St Giles we had met a carter trudging home with his two huge dray horses. He had exclaimed to find anyone out in such inclement weather and had given us a ride in the cart as far as New Osney, so we were not too chilled when at last we had arrived home.
Nell would have a brilliant future, but what about me? I drew the thin blanket up closer beneath my chin and decided that I would forge my own future. It would contain warm fires and chocolate and thick, cosy carpets.
The following day, true to his word, Mr Ashmole sent a clerk to our lodgings with Nell’s horoscope in a scroll tied with a blue ribbon. Mother was in raptures and went to sit by the window to pore over it in the winter light. She did not see the other, smaller scroll that the clerk took from his sleeve and pressed into my hands with the whispered words that Mr Ashmole had decreed it was for my eyes alone.
I waited until Mother had gone out to beg for some stale bread to feed us, then I took her place on the window seat and unrolled it. As with Nell’s chart, there were diagrams and curves, squiggles and letters, none of which made any sense to me.
I was disappointed, but not for long, for the cream ribbon that tied it suited my auburn hair very well.
Folding the chart, I put it away in the old treasure tin I kept beneath my bed whose only other contents were the knife my father had left me, the key to the fishing house at Becote Manor which Mother had told me I could keep because it was worthless, some battered wooden soldiers, a thimble and a shiny gold button.
When Mother wasn’t looking, I also took the blue ribbon from Nell’s scroll and hid it until she had forgotten about it, then took it out and cut it in half to tie my plaits. All in all, I thought I had done quite well by Mr Ashmole.
1
JESS – THE PRESENT, LATE MARCH
‘Welcome to Fortune Hall!’ the sign said. It was wooden, painted in a whimsical vintage style, with horseshoes, four-leaf clovers and various other good-luck symbols. Rather incongruously, it was hanging from a metal spike on the top of a steel gate that was about as welcoming as a slap across the face. It reminded Jess rather too much of the place she had left half an hour before – the open prison at Bright Hill, where her ex-boyfriend was currently residing at His Majesty’s pleasure.
‘I don’t suppose you’ll come to visit me again,’ Jared had said, rather plaintively, when she had pushed back the plastic chair and got up to leave. ‘Not that I blame you. It’s all been a bit of a nightmare.’
‘Especially for the people you defrauded,’ Jess had agreed. Jared’s self-absorption was extraordinary. Even now, after a high-profile trial and a conviction based on an overwhelming pile of evidence, he was still protesting his innocence and complaining that his life had been ruined.
Jess looked through the car window at the painted four-leaf clovers on the sign.
Luck. They said you made your own and, certainly, she felt she had been the architect of her own bad luck through being so oblivious to Jared’s faults. For over two years, she had been taken in by his winning charm and the way he had made her mundane existence seem exciting. For once, her life had seemed almost as dazzling as that of her younger sister, Tavy. Except that it had all been an illusion.
Now, having said a final goodbye to Jared, she realised she didn’t even feel sad, only angry and exhausted. Jess’s losses – the flat she and Jared had once shared, her security, her savings and her self-confidence and faith in her own judgement – were all casualties of the mess, but they felt insignificant compared to the victims of Jared’s investment scam. Elderly people had lost their life savings, students the means to fund their education, families their homes and plans for the future. Night after night, Jess lay awake, tormented by their stories and the desire to make amends.
Even though the police had cleared her of any involvement in Jared’s criminality, she felt responsible. She felt she should have known.
Her sister Tavy’s fame had meant that the whole case had been splashed across the news as well: ‘Cheating trader brother-in-law of reality TV star Tavy Yates steals the dreams of thousands’ was one of the less lurid, albeit inaccurate, headlines.
It was going to take her a while to get back on her feet. Coming to Fortune Hall was a stopgap, Jess told herself, a temporary measure to buy her some time and give her a place to hide away until she felt a bit more resilient. Tavy had suggested it, which was very generous of her under the circumstances. Under normal circumstances, Jess would have flatly refused as she and her sister were polar opposites in just about everything, and spending any time under the same roof as Tavy was bound to end badly. But since Jared, normal circumstances didn’t exist any more and Jess felt a surprising urge to take refuge with her family. Like all her other ideas lately, she thought, it was probably a bad one.
She switched off the car, got out and walked towards the steel gates. They were set between two old lodge houses. Both were squat buildings, stone and foursquare, obviously empty. Through the blank windows she glimpsed fallen masonry and broken beams. The steel fence extended along the road for as far as Jess could see. It was even more secure than the prison had been. She almost expected to see security guards patrolling with dogs.
It was very quiet. Although the main road to Oxford was only a mile away, here, down this narrow country lane, there were no cars and no other signs of life – of the human kind, at least. There were plenty of birds singing and unidentified animals scuffling through the grass verges, although Jess could not see them. After living in London for the past three years, she found the quiet unnerving. It felt as though she could hear it; it was a presence and it made the hair on her neck rise slightly as though someone was watching her.
The gates were even bigger and more imposing at close quarters, the ‘welcome’ sign even more incongruous. Jess recognised it as the logo from the credits of Tavy’s latest TV programme; her sister, a well-known style influencer and celebrity, was in the throes of redesigning a derelict country house for no other reason that Jess could see than that it was the latest in a long line of ‘rescues’ she had performed. Tavy’s brand was to pick random neglected objects, whether abandoned kittens or vintage furniture, and give them a fresh start in life. Not that Jess watched many of Tavy’s programmes, but she did know that her sister spent much of her life under a lens.
Someone was watching her, Jess realised. Two cameras were poised on posts above the gate, pointing beadily in her direction.
There was a shiny steel box with a bell on the wall by the gate. Jess pressed it. And waited.
The day was very still. No more than a hint of breeze stirred the bare branches of the trees. There was a whisper of spring in the air and clusters of primroses were growing wild on the bank inside the fence. Distant traffic noise came from the main road a mile away, blended with the drone of an aeroplane overhead and the cawing of whatever the big black birds were that clustered in the tops of the trees. Crows, rooks, jackdaws, Jess couldn’t remember which was which. She didn’t dislike the country, simply felt out of place in it.
